Nebeling's Waterfall
Historically, women's main source of power was sex, given males physical and hierarchical dominance. Therefore women had to hide their attraction to males, giving them power over men who desired them.
If women admit to their attraction to males, they loose this power, and I guess that's why women are going all bananas in the comment section on that video.
Seems realistic. I have heard that higher voltage reduces the effects of resistance, so it seems like this is be one important piece of the puzzle.
... we in the US have a bad habit of letting future generations carry the burden of decisions we make
I recognize that as a world wide problem. I think an argument can be made that due economic growth and technological advancement, it will be cheaper for the future generations to solve our problems than it is for us now. There are many ways to justify neglecting our problems for future generations to take care off. Ethics, while evolving, hasn't focused on intergenerational ethics yet.
I think it's pretty clear that the people of the future, despite not being physically real have morale rights, albeit different from our own. So yes, I do believe we have to be more mindful of the future generations.
Biggest problem with this is how to distribute the energy. Moving electricity across large distances is very wasteful and I guess the circuits would require a lot of maintenance. I don't know how to solve that problem in a cost-efficient way.
If I am going to claim that morality is cognitive then I think I have to show that our morale intuitions correspond with some mind-independent facts. I believe that morality is reducible to some objective claims about the world, more specifically, I believe what we call morale is simply our best guess at what rational behavior is. Morality is therefore nothing but a set of behaviors that maximize self interest for everyone and the collective. This view has some initial appeal; we tend to call immoral behavior 'stupid', and people who act immorally we call 'dumb'.
I don't know how to perform such a reduction in general, but there are some really interesting, though simplistic cases where there is an obvious connection between rationality and morality. Suppose that two persons are stuck on an island and that they have different skills and abilities. We have a morale intuition that it would be good to cultivate a cooperative relationship. We also have intuitions that it would be wrong for one to exploit the other, that it would be good if they tried to protect each other. These morale intuitions essentially revolve around the idea that it's good to ensure the survival of individual self and the collective.
We can know quite rigorously using mathematics what would be rational in a scenario such as this. It's possible to make a rather simple model of this scenario, and using this model we can show that some actions are at the detriment to the individual performing them and vice versa. Specifically, it's at the detriment to the individual to act in such a way that cooperation is limited because the two persons have different skills and abilities (and there's often a beneficial synergistic effect associated with cooperation). The best strategy in this scenario is to ensure cooperation is cultivated. Many of our morale intuitions give good guesses of how we ought to go about cultivating cooperation. Some are quit obvious, do not kill the other person (in the vast majority of cases), do not cheat or exploit (too much). Some are more subtle; we have an intuition that it's good (alright at least) to have some dignity in the sense that we ought not to sacrifice ourselves (too much) for the betterment of the other. The golden rule, especially, makes a lot of sense in terms of rationality.
The point I want to make is that a lot of morale intuitions can be understood in terms of rationality. If most of our morale intuitions can be understood rationally, then we may say that morality has a rational component. If morality has a rational component, then we have a case for saying that morality is reducible to something mind-independent, since the mathematical treatment of rationality is objective. In other words, what is rational is embedded into the fabric of our world, and therefore morality, to some degree, is as well.
I don't believe that the entirety of what we think of morality can be understood in this way. Evolution has molded us to be biased towards behaviors that are rational but that doesn't mean that our biases are flawless. Even more crucially, evolution hasn't given us any biases towards some modern dilemmas. For instance, evolution couldn't possibly have shown us whether things like genetical engineering is moral, which means that we have to extrapolate from what we have, thus ensuring disagrement. What is rational can be very complicated and therefore, our morale biases might result in irrational behavior. This motivates me to say that morality is cognitive to the degree that morality is rational, it is non-cognitive to the degree that morality depends on irrational factors (such as confusion, the fact that evolution has inadequately molded us for some dilemmas, etc.)
There's the Kantian account of morality that states that acts are immoral if it's logically impossible to make them a universal maxim. According to Kant, lying is immoral because it's logically impossible to lie if everybody were supposed to lie. There's a subtle but crucial point here which is often misunderstood. Kant is not saying that lying is bad because it would have bad consequences. Rather he is investigating what lying means.
When we lie we intentionally misrepresent truth, therefore when we lie we inherently presuppose that our words carry truth. When we speak we necesarilly assume that our words correspond to truth. If we make it a universal rule that everyone ought to lie, then we contradict the assumption that words correspond with truth. But lying depends on this assumption so if we remove it, lying becomes impossible - you can't lie in a world where words aren't supposed to correspond with truth. Therefore, it's impossible to lie if we make lying the universal maxim.
Kant doesn't appeal to emotion anywhere. He is simply stating that acts like lying are immoral because it would be logically impossible to make these acts the universal rule. It's a cold analytical argument, and it seems quite compelling. I don't know what proof refers to in this context, but I do believe we can convince people about the truth of moral propositions without appealing to emotions.
Human creativity is one of the most highly valued human traits and one of the essential reasons why we have an evolutionary edge over everything nature has ever created. Creativity is very important.
Creativity presupposes imagination. In order to be creative we need to have the mental capacity to predict what the would be like of we were to do something or invent some tool. In order to predict like this we have to be imaginative. Therefore, imagination is necessary for creativity and creativity is very important. Imagination is therefore just as important as creativity.
Creativity is only useful in so far as it generates new knowledge. In a changing environment we have to continuously update out perspectives and come up with new ideas of how to surviveh. We have to know how to react in order to successfully live. The importance of creativity is therefore derived from one central premise. It's important to know to react, therefore it's important to be creative (and by extension imaginative). In other words creativity is subordinated knowledge because creativity's importance is derived from the importance of knowledge. In other words still, creativity is at most as important as knowledge.
Our culture adapts faster than our biological nature. Culture changes how we respond to stimuli but it doesn't change our bodies. Technology, however does this. In most cases technology extends our already existing capabilities, but in recent times it has begun to fundamentally change us. Maybe it started with medicine, the usage of drugs, but what we are doing now is much more radical than anything seen before. How much time will go before some person volunteers to have his brain directly connected to a computer?
We are getting increasingly more wired up, the virtual world is slowly becoming more than just a fun and practical alternative to reality. Who's to say that the virtual world can't become our reality?
Your teacher is mistaking weather for climate. Climate is long term tendencies, weather is short term events. Picking out one case of cold weather does not refute the fact of global warming. The average temperature on Earth is increasing, this has been estimated by measuring temperatures all across the Earth.
I really don't think it's so bad. The theists aren't really so radical as and the atheists aren't really as anti-religious as atheists on the internet often are. Well sometimes a fundamentalist anti-gay Christian emerges, but to be honest, I think they are probably just trolls.
